By Alan Eisner
WASHINGTON, D.C – After years of diplomatic deadlock, peace – or at least talk of peace – is in the air again for Israel and the Palestinians.
Last month’s Israeli election, which moved the country back toward the political center, following President Obama’s re-election and his appointment of John Kerry as Secretary of State, seem to have opened the way for a new attempt to settle the conflict.
Kerry, who has repeatedly stated his desire to try once more to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians before the possibility of a two-state solution closes forever, will soon visit the region. And Obama will follow him in the spring in what will be a major opportunity to make the case directly to the Israeli and Palestinian people.
Kerry says Obama is going primarily to listen. “I think we start out by listening and get a sense of what the current state of possibilities are and then begin to make some choices,” the Secretary of State said last week. “It would be a huge mistake, almost an arrogant step, to suddenly be announcing this and that without listening first.”
That’s a good place to start – but it is certain that Kerry and Obama will be called upon to play a much more active role down the road if the talks are to have any chance of success.
Unfortunately, relations between the two parties are at a low ebb with neither side trusting the intentions of the other. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are locked in a counterproductive cycle of blame and counter-blame, each taking steps calculated the enrage the other while setting prospects of fruitful negotiations further and further back.
Israelis and Palestinians seem locked in psychological patterns in which they discount the views and claims of the other side as having little or no validity. Each side has its own narrative, proclaims its own historic and legalistic rights and tries to delegitimize the other side’s claims.
The battle is fought in the media and in international institutions like the United Nations, with both sides and their proxies striving every day to demonstrate how 100 percent right they are and how 100 percent wrong the other side is.
For Israel to reach peace with the Palestinians, a fundamental adjustment of attitudes will be required – on both sides. It should start by both sides recognizing that peace is not a gift that one party can bestow on the other or that one party needs more than the other. It’s not as if the status quo is acceptable and Israel would be doing the Palestinians a big favor by granting them peace – or vice versa.
Some on the Israeli side argue that Abbas is not a suitable partner for peace. But as the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin observed, “you don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.”
Of course, the current Palestinian leadership is far from perfect. Many faults can be found, and failed opportunities debated. But Abbas has kept to a scrupulous policy of non-violence and worked to make Israeli-Palestinians security and economic cooperation succeed. He recognizes Israel’s right to exist and rejects the use of terrorism. If Israel doesn’t work with current Palestinian leaders, one thing is for sure: it will be much, much harder to deal with those who replace them.
In the Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers, which has recently been creating such a stir in Israel and the United States, six former directors of the Shin Bet security service argue how important it is for Israel to finally end the occupation of Palestinians – for Israel’s own long-term well-being.
Avraham Shalom, the oldest of the group, who was known for his tough tactics, concludes that Israeli policy has become more about punishing the Palestinians than anything else. “We have become cruel,” he says. And, as a result, as fellow former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon says in the film’s closing, Israel risks “winning every battle but losing the war.”
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Eisner is vice president for communications for J Street.